Aestheticism and Decadence in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (original) (raw)
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This thesis examines the debate between morality and aesthetics that is outlined by Nabokov in Lolita's afterword. Incorporating a discussion of Lolita's critical history in order to reveal how critics have chosen a single, limited side of the debate, either the moral or aesthetic, this thesis seeks to expose the complexities of the novel where morality and aesthetics intersect. First, the general moral and aesthetic features of Lolita are discussed. Finally, I address the two together, illustrating how Lolita cannot be categorized as immoral, amoral, or didactic. Instead, it is through the juxtaposition of form and content, parody and reality, that the intersection of aesthetics and morality appears, subverting and repudiating the voice of its own narrator and protagonist, evoking sympathy for an appropriated and abused child, and challenging readers to evaluate their own ethical boundaries.
“Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature and the Shaping of Lolita.”
In: Lolita: Critical Insights, edited by Rachel Stauffer, pp. 27-44. Ipswich, Mass.: Grey House Publishing/Salem Press, 2016
Lolita is well known as Nabokov’s most “American” novel, cementing his success as an American writer, paving the road to international fame, and famously highlighting the thorough knowledge of American culture that he acquired during years of residence in the United States. The author himself further accentuated his connection to the U.S. in subsequent interviews and autobiographical writings, downplaying the multiple layers of Russian culture that helped to shape his novel. Indeed, the extent to which this most American of novels sinks its roots deep into Russian literary tradition often escapes readers’ notice. Nonetheless, even while reinventing himself as an American writer, Nabokov continued to re-elaborate elements from the Russian texts that he knew well, echoing and often parodying antecedent images, bits of plot, literary personages, and narrative structures; the densely allusive Lolita, which has been described as postmodern for its numerous references to and sustained parallels with prior literary texts, is a case in point. This chapter outlines Lolita’s fundamental connection to several classic works from nineteenth-century Russian literature by outlining some of the multiple intertextual connections between that novel and its classic predecessors, specifically those authors and works whose themes, paradigms, and personages are relatively well-known – over and above their resonance in Lolita – and are especially likely to be familiar to students. It illuminates a part of Nabokov’s own cultural background, makes Pushkin, Gogol’, Lermontov, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy more clearly relevant for readers of Lolita, and engages students of the Russian nineteenth-century classics with issues of that tradition’s continuity into the next century. As will become clear, the dubious psychological state of Lolita’s protagonist, his perverse sexual desires, the techniques by which his character and crimes are revealed to the reader, and also the entanglement of identity involving author, authorial persona, and other literary personages may all be linked to Russian antecedents.
"Even Homais Nods": Nabokov's Fallibility, or, How to Revise Lolita
Nabokov Studies, 1995
A discrepancy in the dates within Lolita (between the 56 days Humbert says it took to write his his confession, presumably in prison, and the 56 days between his receiving Lolita's letter and his death, which leaves only 53 days in prison) has led a number of critics to propose extravagant "interpretations" about the self-undermining of the narrative. I show that despite Nabokov's care with details he often made mistakes, especially with dates. The various revisionist readings based on the dating discrepancy are internally inconsistent and unlicenced by this one discrepancy, completely diverge from one another, add nothing to the novel, and subtract a great deal.
The Paradox of Fiction: A Reading of Nabokov's Lolita - Public Lecture 1999
1999
The Paradox of Fiction: A Reading of Nabokov's Lolita What is literature? What is good literature? How shall we approach fiction? Vladimir Nabokov's answers to these fundamental questions about literature are perfectly simple. Literature, Nabokov says, was not born when a boy saw a wolf and cried, "Wolf! Wolf!" Literature was born when a boy cried, "Wolf! Wolf!" but there was no wolf around. A good book, Nabokov held, should not make us think; it should make us shiver. The perfect reader, according to Nabokov, does not identify with any of the characters in the work of fiction but, rather, with the mind of its creator. Put together, these three answers form a paradoxical definition of literary fiction: it is a lie that makes us shiver, although we know the mind of the liar. One solution to this paradox can be observed in the traditional realistic novel. The reader is being enticed to identify with the characters, to feel and think with them, while the author's mind remains hidden-no clues about the moving forces behind the creator's design, no birth-traces. Although during the process of reading the work the reader might interpret it passively, the active interpretation usually follows the reading of the whole work. This model presupposes an unequal relationship between the author and the readers, who willingly submit themselves to deception. The readers are capable of entering the make-believe world of the realistic novel precisely because they are not burdened with an awareness of the creator's mind. Instead of solving or avoiding the paradox of fiction, some writers use the tension created by this paradox as a moving force in their narratives. Cervantes was one of these writers, Shakespeare another. Vladimir Nabokov is a member of the same family of writers who playfully confess or at least hint that they are telling a lie, yet making the reader shiver. In life, this would be an impossible situation. In literature, it is a source of special delight. The relationship between the author and the reader resembles an intellectual game-for example, a chess-game, to borrow from Nabokov's imagery. Lolita, like Vladimir Nabokov's other works, is a paradigmatic example of a novel built on the paradox of fiction. Moreover, Lolita is a parody of the fiction that tries to escape the paradox of fiction. It mocks the expectations of the reader of the realistic novel. For example, the "Foreword" to Lolita contains the kind of information about the characters that is supplied in the epilogue of a nineteenth-century novel: "For the benefit of old-fashioned
[2016] Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita: Text, Paratext, and Translation
2016
This article addresses the relationship between text and paratext in the publication history of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita. Such paratexts include Nabokov’s own afterword to the 1958 American edition and his postscript (published in 1967) to his own translation of Lolita into Russian, as well as various introductions and afterwords, both in English-language editions and in translations of Lolita into Russian and other languages. A particularly interesting type of paratext is constituted by annotations to the main text, and the analysis focuses on parallel examples published in annotated editions of Lolita in English, Russian, Polish, German, Ukrainian, and French. The analysis shows that the most detailed annotations concerning the totality of the English and Russian Lolita text and paratexts can be found in editions published in languages other than English and Russian, whereas most English or Russian editions seem to focus on the respective language version. There is still no complete, annotated edition of the bilingual text containing all the authorial paratexts.
Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita and the Merited-Response Argument
Diametros
In attempting to answer whether Nabokov’s Lolita can be described as an unethical novel, the author ponders on what basis one could make such a determination. At (1) the author analyzes the merited-response argument offered by Gaut (and previously Hume and Carroll), which provides a conceptual framework for the resolution of the controversy surrounding Lolita. Based on this analysis, (2) the author decides what constitutes the novel’s ethical foundation and what (3) prescriptions and (4) responses can follow from it.
2020
Lolita" has become a cultural icon, normalizing, sometimes celebrating, the sexualization of children-this is known as the Lolita effect. This study seeks to examine the role the novel and aspects of its scholarship have played in creating this effect. Combining textual analysis and a literature review, this study juxtaposes the fictive depictions of the novel with the actuality of abuse as delineated by research studies. These findings are contrasted with elements of the discourse that have influenced their interpretation. Significant levels of concordance were found, revealing that Nabokov had a remarkably prescient knowledge of the feelings and cognitions of an abuser, the strategies utilized in grooming, and the diagnostic category of hebephilia long before these issues were discovered by research. Given the novel's social and cultural impact, this paper calls for a re-examination of the relationship between the novel's fiction and the clinical reality of child sexual abuse.
Lolita Reading "Lolita": the Rhetoric of Reader Participation
Nabokov Studies, 2016
Following Roland Barthes’ definition, this paper argues that "Lolita" is a “text of bliss”, namely a text that discomforts the reader, bringing to a crisis his/her relation with language. At the same time, it is based on Wolfgang Iser’s notion of the text as an event, designating the reader’s continual oscillation between involvement and observation. The research objective is to find out how "Lolita" is supposed to be read by Nabokov’s “good reader”: what the given instructions are and how the reader should interact with them. The development of the Humbert – Lolita relationship in the novel in contrast to its transformation in the screenplay is of particular interest because it seems to figure the interaction between author/text and reader. The findings uncover how aesthetic and sensual come together to entangle the reader in the text, and thus art is demonstrated as a clash and aesthetic bliss at the same time. -- Sincere thanks for the thoughtful comments and suggestions to the members of the Slavic Kruzhok at UC Berkeley (esp. Chloë Kitzinger, Matt Kendall), where an earlier version of this paper was presented, to the working group in reception theories of the Humanities Seminar in Sofia (Bogdana Paskaleva, Chavdar Parushev), and to the two anonymous reviewers for the "Nabokov Studies"; as well as to Michelle Asbill for proofreading. My interest in this novel was first instigated by Rumyana Evtimova, and further curiosity was kept by my talks with Reneta Bozhankova. This publication might not have existed if Irina Paperno hadn't encouraged me to keep on writing in English. Gratefully acknowledging the Fulbright scholarship, which brought me to Berkeley in 2014, I am most obliged to Eric Naiman’s inspiring seminar on "Lolita" and his invaluable guidance.